


Heart of Darkness

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-12
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2018-03-22 14:52:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3733018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary Margaret realises David got the blackened piece of heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart of Darkness

There hadn’t been time to think when Snow had cast the curse. She just knew that she had to rip out half of her heart and give it to Charming to make sure he survived and made it back to Storybrooke in order that they could both be reunited with Emma and with each other. Would there even have been time to have asked Regina to ensure that she was to be the one to receive that half of the heart? Thinking about it now, she didn’t think there had been, but the idea continued to eat at her that it could have been possible. Then, of course, once they were back in Storybrooke, she couldn’t remember the circumstances of the casting of the curse and didn’t know what had happened. Once she did remember, there had been no reason at the time for her to have given it any more thought.

But now Mary Margaret thought she knew. David got the piece of her heart which contained the black spot Regina had shown her after Cora’s death. Now she could see the darkness coming out in him, and she knew it was all her fault. She’d tried to tell herself it wasn’t happening, but as she’d listened to David talk about destroying that page in the book knowing full well the author remained trapped inside, she knew for sure.

She should have known. Just about everyone in their world had been told by Rumpelstiltskin at some point that all magic came with a price. But Snow hadn’t considered any consequences at the time she agreed to the spell that would remove any potential for darkness in Emma, even though Charming had tried to point out that he had seen no evil in his own vision of the future. “What you saw could have been the future after we did the spell,” Snow had argued. “I saw her ripping my heart out and not caring. I can’t let that happen.”

And as for Maleficent, well, she was ashamed now that she hadn’t believed that there was any hope for any offspring of hers, that she had automatically assumed that a dragon and not a baby would hatch from the egg. If she had known that much, what would she have done differently? Thinking about it now, Mary Margaret liked to think that she would have called a stop to the spell. But she knew that she could never say for sure.

Once Mary Margaret knew that Maleficent’s child had not only ended up in the Land Without Magic, but that Lily had actually been a childhood friend of Emma’s at one time, she had asked Emma lots of questions about the Lily she had known. Emma had explained that she’d only really known Lily for a short time, but she told her everything that she remembered. “She shoplifted, and she lied to me, but I didn’t see any reason to think that she was dark. The shoplifting was only what I was doing myself. I threw out her contact details after her dad took her away, and I heard no more from her after that.” Even though it was clear that Emma didn’t know any more than that at that stage about how Lily had turned out, Mary Margaret had continued asking her the same questions over and over again in the hope that Emma would remember something else, something that would reassure Mary Margaret that Lily had turned out okay in spite of her. In the end, Killian had taken Mary Margaret to one side and asked her to let it drop, saying that Emma felt guilty enough as it was about having walked away from Lily at the time and that Mary Margaret’s questioning was only making things worse. Emma was already trying to trace Lily, in the hope that she could give both Mary Margaret and Maleficent the answers that they needed, and Mary Margaret would be better to let her get on with it. That just made Mary Margaret feel even more guilty that Emma was having to clear up her mess.

She knew she couldn’t tell Emma about her fears for David. Emma didn’t seem to have noticed anything herself, which Mary Margaret put down to the fact that she was too busy trying to track down Lily to have picked up on the changes in David. But Mary Margaret knew that the darkness she could see was only going to get worse. Regina had told her so the day she’d pulled out Mary Margaret’s heart and shown her the black spot on it. “And once you blacken your heart, it only grows darker. And darker. Trust me. I know.”

Mary Margaret now knew that Regina was right, in a way she hadn’t understood at the time. She had tried to block out what she had done at the time by telling herself all over again that she had done what she needed to do to protect her own child. Gold would later tell her that this was how he had come to terms with his own misdemeanours over the years. “Well, you tell yourself you did the right thing. And if you say it often enough, one day you might actually believe it.” At the time, Mary Margaret hadn’t thought that would ever be the case for her, but now she realised that she had done exactly that after Maleficent’s egg was sent to the Land Without Magic, separated from Maleficent, all the potential darkness trapped inside it. 

This was what she had condemned David to, and Mary Margaret didn’t think there was anything she could do about it. The darkness she was already beginning to sense in David would grow stronger, and she knew of no way to be sure of stopping it. Even if that spell would work again, which Mary Margaret didn’t think it would since the author had conveyed the impression that it only worked by transferring from one blank slate to another, she knew she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She’d tried asking Regina, and she’d also tried Blue, and in one despondent moment she’d even considered approaching Gold before coming to her senses and realising that that would only make matters worse. Regina and Blue hadn’t been able to offer any kind of magical solution that wouldn’t come with some consequence or other, and Mary Margaret had then wondered whether it was fair of her to have asked Regina anyway considering that it had been Regina’s mother who had died as a consequence of the blackening of Mary Margaret’s heart and Regina who had been manipulated into putting the heart back into Cora’s body.

Then she thought back to the day when she had confessed to David that the black spot was there, and David had told her not to worry about it and they would find another way. Just as he had believed that redemption was possible for her, so she believed in him, and knew that there would be a way in which she could help prevent the blackness taking full hold of his heart, and she would never give up until she had found it.


End file.
